Responsible Design, Implementation and Use of Information and Communication Technology

Public procurement constitutes a core government function for providing goods and services to citizens. The overall success of a digitized public-procurement function yields progress and economic growth for the nation. In this research, we analyze the potential of blockchain-based systems to enhance effectiveness, ease, and transparency in public procurement in the case of Nigeria and identify the current challenges facing public procurement, i.e., lack of trust and transparency among critical stakeholders in the procurement process, systems that only weakly support transaction recording and documentation, complex process structures, corruption in institutions involved in the procurement process. To address these issues, a blockchain-based framework is developed to enable interoperability of information-systems involved in the procurement process, increase citizen participation in eliciting project requirements and to enable a more transparent project monitoring and auditing. We apply the framework to a case study with respect to identifying on-chain activities that enable system interoperability, e-participation and project auditability.

Patient-centred care allows patients to have complete autonomy in managing their health information and encourages patients to be proactive. Unfortunately, most patients do not have access to their complete health information as they are stored across the various institutions that they have visited over their lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation into developing a mobile system for patient-centered healthcare using blockchain technology. A design science research approach was used to design, develop and evaluate a prototype that implemented a three-tier architecture using blockchain. Formative evaluations of the prototype revealed that the system could successfully support patient-managed healthcare. The implications of this project would be changing the way patients and healthcare practitioners interact with each other by improving the quality of clinical encounters by allowing patients access to their health information, sharing the information with healthcare practitioners and both parties collaborating in the development of a treatment plan.

The purpose of this study is to explore whether the diffusion of cryptocurrencies represents a disruptive change and what is the potential magnitude of this change. To this end, we take disruptive innovation theory as our point of departure to scrutinize cryptocurrencies as an instance of socio-technical change. We employ Causal Layered Analysis to develop our four-layer analytical framework to conceptually examine the changes pertained by the diffusion of cryptocurrencies. We provide examples of changes company-level, industry-level as well as societal changes where cryptocurrencies have played a central role. On a company level, cryptocurrencies provide a cost-efficient means for cross-border money transfer and thus pose a significant threat to the existing intermediary-based business models. On an industry level, many central banks are experimenting with crypto- or digital currencies. On a societal level, cryptocurrencies play an important role in particularly when the traditional institutions and societal structures collapse. For example, in Venezuela’s recent political and economic crisis, cryptocurrencies contributed to the development of a parallel financial system when the bolivar practically lost its value. Our study provides an analytical framework to systematically evaluate the potential disruptive nature of cryptocurrencies as well as other blockchain-based technologies.

Smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and Smart Factory are phenomena regarded as a key necessity for Small, Medium and Micro Businesses (SMMEs) worldwide. Even though these 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) phenomena are generally used interchangeably, this paper sought to identify how SMME readiness for smart manufacturing has been investigated through a systematic review. The systematic review was conducted through the lens of Nooteboom, and Tornatzky and Klein’s research on technological innovation in SMMEs based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory. The findings reveal that there is little to no research on smart manufacturing in relation to SMMEs in low-income countries particularly the African continent. The results also show that smart manufacturing is still an emergent phenomenon with disparate definitional challenges. These definitional challenges make the adoption of smart manufacturing innovations a challenge in resource-constrained contexts; but similarly present an opportunity for new definitions and theories in such contexts. The little research often treats SMMEs homogenously and as such misses their important heterogeneous (sector or industry specific) nature. Few research studies investigate SMME awareness (adequate knowledge) or make explicit the benefits (relative advantage) of smart manufacturing. Even fewer studies are explicit on the smart manufacturing technologies that are relevant for different SMME sectors. Smart manufacturing is identified as incompatible with SMME characteristics, that is SMMEs lack expertise/skills to comprehend the complexity of smart manufacturing, and also lack financial and human resources to implement smart manufacturing. Given that awareness, relative advantage, complexity and compatibility are critical barriers for SMME smart manufacturing readiness/adoption, there is a critical need for research to focus on these factors in particular for the context of resource constrained low-income country environments.

Smart city initiatives are widely becoming part of the world agenda to address crises and to identify new initiatives for countries to manage resources while providing better living conditions for all citizens. The purpose of this study was to design a model to support the alignment of value in Smart City initiatives. To address this purpose, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to find what Smart City initiatives have been addressed in empirical studies, and what dimensions and factors are linked to these initiatives. The SLR also identified the stakeholders in a Smart City, and what their roles should be linked to these initiatives. Six theories were identified and used to undergird the researcher’s understanding of the domains of Smart Cities, value and alignment. The concepts from these theories were then used with the SLR findings to design a conceptual model for Smart City initiatives. The proposed Value Alignment Smart City Model (VASC) can be used to plan or assess Smart City initiatives. The main contribution is the alignment of value amongst stakeholders to support the success of such initiatives. Further research is required to investigate adopting the model and empirically evaluate it.

Inter-organisational relationships have been receiving increased attention in the context of the fourth industrial revolution. Technological advances in connectivity and digitisation are enabling vertically and horizontally integrated networks. The highly technical and dynamic environment in which various types of relationships exist requires a high level of cooperation and transparency between partners. The importance for Small and Medium Sized Organisations (SMEs) to develop and improve their relational capabilities is widely acknowledged. This research paper thus presents a tool and methodology that will enable SMEs to assess and improve these capabilities within the organisation. This paper aims to identify those requirements and practices described in the literature as conducive to sustainable relationship formation and development. A Relational Capability Maturity Model (RCMM) is proposed as a tool that will be able to address the requirements across the various functions of the organisation.

Industry 4.0 and its related-cutting edge technologies are generating unprecedented changes and bringing complex challenges in practically all types of business. In this context, new concepts such as digital connectivity, interconnection, and interoperability emerged as highly disruptive approaches for logistics systems and supply chain management (SCM). To shed more light on these complexities and see how companies organized in a SCM model can adopt, implement and operate in a digital connectivity model, this study proposes a framework, namely SIMPLE. To develop the framework, we employed a literature review approach, focusing on recent studies published in journals. After the literature analysis, six dimensions related to digital connectivity in supply chains and logistics emerged, namely Smart, Innovative, Measurable, Profitable, Lean, and Excellence (SIMPLE). This framework brings opportunities for future studies, while providing important insights into the dynamics of digital connectivity in logistics and supply chains. Therefore, these SIMPLE framework dimensions should enable the actors involved in organizations’ operations to interact adequately and harmoniously so as to maximize the value generated in the network.

The so-called fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 (I4.0), with its potentially disruptive technologies, is changing the way we socialise, live and work and provides opportunities for organisations to innovate and disrupt. Although organisations are acknowledging the emergence of I4.0 and realise the importance of being ready for its impact, better understanding is required of the potential of I4.0 and its holistic impact on organisations. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify all I4.0-related organisational aspects, such as an I4.0-relevant strategy, digital business model innovation, technology investment optimisation, workforce management complexity, digital eco-systems, technology-centric convergence, virtual model and physical environment linkage, value chain digitalisation and product portfolio innovation. Furthermore, we presented these I4.0 organisational aspects identified in a conceptual model based on the components of organisational strategic alignment. By using such a conceptual model, organisations can ensure that both optimisation and new opportunities enabled by I4.0 are leveraged and that a relevant, strategically aligned approach to I4.0 may be considered.

Rapid development of advanced technologies and their use bear crucial influence on Smart City development. Smart economy ranks among key Smart City components. The rising awareness of the importance of Economy in Smart cities becomes a widely discussed issue and gets reflected in professional literature. The aim of the paper is to map and analyse the state of usage of current topics and terms “SMART city” and “economy” and their bibliographic coupling and co-occurrence on Web of Science. The analysis focuses on published documents and their citation, use of journals for publishing of articles, authors that have the most articles, number of published documents in countries. The reoccurrence of the most often used key words in the articles will be analysed. Analysis was done in March 2019 via VOSviewer software. The highest number of articles is presented in Smart economy in smart cities, Journal of cleaner production and Cities. USA and India are the countries with highest number of articles. Smart city, Cities, Smart cities, Governance, Innovation, Big data, Economy and Urbanization are the most often used keywords.

This paper explores an overly optimistic and tenacious claim in the literature that robotic process automation (RPA) will only free knowledge workers from mundane tasks and introduce more interesting work. We explore this claim and other consequences for knowledge workers using data from a sequential quantitative-qualitative, mixed-method study in Norway. 88 RPA users from different sectors and industries where first surveyed to identify differences in utilization and effects from RPA. Then, differences were explored in 24 in-depth interviews in the public and private sectors, including financial industry, manufacturing, and oil and gas. Results indicate that RPA is used to either layoff or not reemploy knowledge workers, but also to empower knowledge workers with more interesting tasks. Private sector was different from public sector in that private, financial companies have experienced the strongest reduction in the need for employment. RPA often lead to layoffs indirectly, and to reduced need for consultants, especially in financial companies. In contrast, public companies use RPA more for innovations in their service production from increased quality in data registration, handling of invoices, and data migration between systems. We conclude that RPA is maturing as a management tool motivated by cost reductions from reduced employment, and we suggest propositions for further research.

There is a growing emphasis on digitalization in research and business practice. The rapid progress in digital technologies compel firms to innovate and transform their businesses. One way to improve the capacity to innovate and transform is to cooperate with others. However, there is a general lack of research on how co-creation among businesses can facilitate digitalization. This qualitative study explores how co-creation among businesses can stimulate and facilitate digitalization.We have investigated co-creation activities involving companies in business clusters. This paper reports from a study of three business clusters in Norway. We conducted an inductive qualitative study comprising semi-structured interviews as the primary empirical data source. 12 interviews were carried out with informants from three clusters. We found that the co-creation arenas and activities in the business clusters stimulate and facilitate digitalization among the cluster companies. We also addressed the most significant drivers and barriers to co-creation to get a deeper understanding of the co-creation phenomenon.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a new concept that has the potential to add value to any industrial organisation that wants to embark on the implementation thereof. Due to this newness of IoT in industrial operations, an increase in cost and maturity in terms of data handling, together with only a few implementations. There was a gap in available practical IIoT frameworks that could aid interested parties in the understanding of the constructs of IIoT and the practical implications of implementation. Within this study, we propose an Industrial Internet of Things framework intended to aid academic, technical and management persons in understanding the different considerations of the Industrial Internet of Things. This framework could also apply as a basis for implementation considerations.

Cybersecurity readiness is a challenging issue for online retail businesses which are losing billions of dollars due to cyber-crimes and a lack of readiness to manage these. Therefore, research into cybersecurity readiness in the online retail industry is needed. Technical tools are the foremost measures of defence against these attacks. This study investigates cybersecurity readiness from the technical perspective in some UK online retailers. This research adopted a qualitative case study approach with semi-structured interviews for collecting data. A total of 15 interviews were conducted with an online retail company’s staff and management who had responsibility for managing cybersecurity. A thematic analysis method was used to analyse the qualitative data. The research findings show that the company is facing internal and external threats to their information systems and their technical defences are not very effective at present. The company should consider investing more resources in the technical controls to prevent these attacks.

Mobile phones have become an integral part of human lives with majority of people using them to access product and services for their day-to-day needs. However, mobile shopping adoption across the globe is not wide or fast as expected. In addition, the research is very scant in understanding various predictors of consumer adoption towards mobile shopping. The objective of this study is to identify most significant and non-significant predictors of consumer mobile shopping acceptance. Systematic review and weight analysis on 34 mobile shopping studies revealed researchers mostly employed TAM and UTAUT model as theoretical lens. This study found an interesting revelation that extrinsic motivation variables such as social influence and perceived usefulness determine consumer mobile shopping behavioral intention during early stages. However, in later stages intrinsic motivation variables such as satisfaction and trust play crucial role to emerge as best and promising predictor of consumer continuous intention respectively.

Social commerce is a rapidly growing platform of e-commerce that utilises social media and online social interaction to build brand awareness and increase sales. Buying and selling through social media can create a reliable and sustainable platform for buyers and vendors, offering an alternative platform to traditional online approaches. Research on social commerce began to achieve traction in 2006 and has grown since with a significant focus from academics who have offered new insight to many of the key topics. This study seeks to offer an additional contribution to the literature by analysing the predictors of consumer adoption of social commerce from existing studies by employing a weight analysis technique. The analysis considered seven dependent variables (along with their best and worst predictors) that are most frequently examined and are relevant to consumer adoption. The review presented in this study suggests that the intention to purchase is the most frequently examined dependent variable and that trust in the social commerce context is a key factor.

This study systematically reviews extant contemporary literature on digital entrepreneurship in peer-reviewed journal articles over six years (2013–2018) from six journal databases. It involved a systematic literature review of 101 papers from 53 journals focusing on the publication outlets, yearly trends, themes, and associated theoretical and conceptual approaches, methodologies, sources and geographical distribution of digital entrepreneurship research. The findings suggest that extant literature mostly lacked sound theoretical underpinnings. More work adopting appropriate and proven theoretical approaches is needed. Most of the reviewed papers also focused mainly on issues relating to the technology itself than those relating to the enterprise or the entrepreneur. The capabilities and capacities of enterprises, as well as the strategies in implementing digital technologies and harnessing the opportunities of digitalization, are key issues that have not hitherto received much attention. The study contributes to the understanding of the conceptualization of the digital entrepreneurship phenomenon. Future research should consolidate the understanding of the field, with models and frameworks that recognize digital entrepreneurship as an academic research field in its own right, and also consider the impact of enterprise capabilities and capacities on digital entrepreneurship.

Encouraged by the crucial need to understand merchant adoption of mobile payment, this study explores the role trust play in the adoption of mobile payment by merchant and the enablers for merchant’s trust in mobile payment systems. This was done by Conceptualising the characteristics of the service provider and technology characteristics as the two dimensions that could influence merchant adoption of mobile payments. The study was done through the lenses of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Trust-Theoretic Model and adopted a qualitative approach where two merchants were selected from the health sector. The findings demonstrate that the role of merchant trust is very critical for adoption due to m-payment technology and security risk. Hence, sufficient trust-building structures in mobile payment space are essential for the adoption of mobile payment by merchants. Moreover, the findings indicate mobile service provider characteristics and the mobile technology characteristics are both imperative toward building trust in mobile payment systems for merchants’ adoption. The study also found that the trust of both technology and service provider has a far more critical influence on merchants’ adoption of mobile payments than perceived usefulness or ease of use. The study, therefore, recommends that service providers should consider the opportunity to nurture merchant trust because merchant trust acts as a fundamental enabler for the adoption of mobile payments. Other implications are also discussed.

While online price comparison websites have burgeoned, there is scant understanding of how they influence online consumer behavior. This study addresses this gap in the literature by investigating the influence of price comparison websites on online switching behavior, and also suggests some additional factors that may be considered when looking at this relationship. We argue that shopper innovativeness, their perceived usefulness of the ad, and their customer service experience consciousness are important factors to consider when evaluating the impact of price comparison websites on eSwitching behavior. We also argue that the most appropriate theoretical lens through which to investigate this relationship is that of the consumer empowerment paradigm. A conceptual model is proposed and tested. Our analysis of 345 sample respondents finds that perceived usefulness of ads and customer service experience expectations are important enablers to price comparison websites use. Similarly, we find that shopper innovativeness and customer service expectations, in addition to price comparison websites use, are significant enablers to eSwitching behaviour. However, contrary to prediction, we find that shopper innovativeness has little to no influence on shoppers’ use of price comparison websites; we also observed similar patterns concerning the link between the perceived usefulness of online ads and eSwitching behaviour. In conclusion, our research contributes to better understanding the influence of price comparison websites on online switching behavior, and the factors that might influence this relationship.

Technologically, competition is fierce in the banking industry, as such, banks need to offer cutting-edge technology and still make sure the banking solutions provided keep customers satisfied, as customers could switch between banks with minimum inconvenience. Electronic service quality measures the level of satisfaction deliver to bank customers through online banking digital solutions. This paper provides an investigation of electronic service quality based on customers’ perceptions in South Africa. The paper presents findings based on quantitative data from 184 online banking customers using E-S-QUAL measurement scale. The results show that banks are meeting customer expectations of service quality delivery, although there is room for improvement. The study has practical implications to financial institutions in South Africa, as it highlights areas of attention to improve service quality delivered to online banking customers.

The characteristics of digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation and how they are related, is complex and important to understand in this digital age. Such an understanding of digital entrepreneurship is perceived as a key pillar for economic growth, job creation and innovation. However, a number of issues regarding digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation are prevalent, inhibiting digital entrepreneurs to optimise the advantages that digital entrepreneurship contributes towards business value. Therefore, the aim of this research paper is to investigate digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation, their characteristics and inter-relationships. Data extracted and analysed through a structured analysis process, recognises and discusses the characteristics of digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation. The characteristics are reported by employing the Dynamic Capabilities Theory as the structure. By understanding the characteristics of digital entrepreneurship and digital transformation, individuals and organisations may either create new business ventures or transform existing businesses through the development of novel digital technologies or the innovative application of such technologies.

This study aims to identify the conceptual structure and the thematic progress in e-Business, e-Services and e-Society and to elaborate on backbone/emerging topics in the field from 2001 to 2019. To address this objective, this paper employs hierarchical clustering, strategic diagrams and network analysis to construct the intellectual map of the I3E community and to visualize the thematic landscape in this field, using co-word analysis. Overall, a total of 835 papers from the proceedings of the e-Business, e-Services and e-Society (I3E) conference, and the respective 2574 author-assigned keywords, were included in the analyses. The results indicate that the community has significantly focused in areas like technology adoption models, Social Media, e-Government and business models; sentiment analysis and m-payments are peripheral themes, yet topics like cloud computing and Open Data are emerging. The analysis highlights the shift of the research interest throughout the past decades, and the rise of new topics, comprising evidence that the field is expanding and evolving. Limitations of the approach and future work plans conclude the paper.

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) significantly affects the consumer decision-making process. A number of studies investigated why consumers provide eWOM communications. Existing literature has contradicting factors regarding factors affect eWOM providing behaviour. This study aims to evaluate factors affecting eWOM providing behaviour by performing a systematic review and weight analysis of existing research outputs. Based on the result of weight analysis it was found that the best predictors of eWOM providing behaviour are involvement, self-enhancement, and trust in web eWOM services. Scholars can use the results of this study when making decisions regarding the inclusion of factors in their research. Practitioners can pay more attention to the best predictors.

Sustainable food security (Sfs) desires not only that people always have passage to ample and nutritious food, but also that this food be formed with minimum environmental impact. This research is aimed at developing a mobile application for marketing organic farm products with the functionality of automated geo-location services, preferred goods delivery services, easy access to different organic farm produce. The mobile user platform consists of the Presentation, Business, Data and Data storage which is a slight variation of the Model-View-Controller architecture. It also takes into deep awareness the configuration, security and communications aspect as these are the underlying factors for the robustness of mobile application. The Presentation Tier consists of the user interface and the logic used to navigate around the user interface meaningfully. It modifies and shows information into a human distinct pattern. The Business Logic tier is essentially efficient for information transfer between the user interface and the database of the project. The last layer of the three-tiered architecture is the Data Access tier, which is made up of the Database servers. The application was implemented in Java, SQLite (local) and PHP for the backend server and Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure. Farmers were engaged in cursory testing. Users find the application concept very interesting.

It has been shown that serious games are useful in the military, healthcare, and education sectors. Meanwhile corporate interest in serious gaming in business has rapidly grown internationally. However the level of awareness and adoption of serious gaming among South African corporates in business is still unclear.This interpretive study explores South African corporate awareness of serious gaming in business and the barriers to its adoption. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data from managers in Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies. Eight participants were interviewed across four different industries. Data analysis was guided by the general inductive approach.The absence of serious gaming adopters among the participants, and the general lack of awareness of serious gaming in business were identified as the most salient features. The analysis suggests that corporates currently use technologies related to serious games (e-learning, collaborative tools, and simulation tools), and that there is a demand for the greater promotion and use of serious gaming.While the findings provide new insights into the level of serious gaming awareness, caution should be exercised when attempting to generalize these findings due to the small sample and the scarcity of prior research.

Corporate governance has been severely condemned, as a result of company failures around the world. Regulatory and legislative measure have been introduced in response to these failures. However, arguments by sceptics advocate that it is time consuming and costly to comply these legislative measures that cause overregulation. These measures further do not always add value to business initiatives and adherence to these measures cannot be enforced or guaranteed. This paper argues for the use of business process management systems (BPMSs) to improve corporate governance. The “dynamics capabilities theory model of IT-enabled organisational performance” [1] is applied in this study as theoretical underpinning. A theoretical framework is proposed for IT-enabled and IT-enforced corporate governance compliance using a BPMS, after collecting data from seven BPMS user companies and a BPMS vendor company in South Africa.

Fintech is an active area of innovation and a rapidly growing sector of the economy, yet relatively little is known about how information technology contributes to innovation in fintech. We draw on the business model canvas framework and we examine the role of information technology in the business models of leading fintech startups in the New York City fintech ecosystem. We find that information technology plays a key role across nearly all components of the business models, orchestrating resources and processes to efficiently deliver personalized financial services to customers. Focusing on the IT-enabled value propositions across the fintech startups in our sample, we find that the startups tend to emphasize low-cost offerings that may pose a threat to incumbent business models in financial services.

Obtaining and maintaining a competitive advantage is vital for profit-driven organizations. Business Process Management (BPM) and the governance thereof offer such organizations a framework of management practices within which to achieve this goal. The objectives of this study were to identify and describe the BPM governance challenges that constrain BPM in large South African corporates as BPM in South Africa had not previously received any comprehensive BPM governance focus. Additionally, the BPM and BPM governance bodies of knowledge lack literature on studies focused on BPM governance challenges. Qualitative research methods were utilized to collect useful and descriptive data through secondary document collection and interviews in a single case study. The study confirmed eight of the literature-identified governance challenge themes that constrain BPM and contributed eleven new BPM governance challenge themes to the BPM and BPM governance body of research.

When it comes to the economic and strategic development of companies, maturity models are regarded as silver bullets. However, the existing discrepancy between the large amount of existing, differently developed models and their rare application remains astonishing. We focus on this phenomenon by analyzing the models’ interpretability and possible structural and conceptual inconsistencies. By analyzing existing, staged maturity models, we develop a meta model for staged maturity models so different maturity models may share common semantics and syntax. Our meta model can therefore contribute to the conceptual rigor of existing and future maturity models in all domains and can be decisive for the success or failure of a maturity measurement in a company.

This paper considers the dichotomy inherent in Information Systems where its introduction, for the purposes of creating new or sustaining existing business value, subsequently also inadvertently or deliberately dissipates value. We investigate root people-induced causes, delineated within a rudimentary Conceptual Technology Value Framework. To support a qualitative investigation, the framework is forthwith applied as the basis for a series of interviews within a major South African financial institution operating within the disciplines of information technology, business operations and organisational development. The constructs identified are discussed and find gestalt in an Adjusted Technology Value Model which can be used to safeguard business value against destructive HCI behaviors.

To preserve competitive advantage in a more and more digitalized environment, today’s organizations seek to assess their level of digital maturity. Given this particular practical relevance, a plethora of digital maturity models, designed to asses a company’s digital status quo, has emerged over the past few years. Largely developed and published by practitioners, the academic value of these models remains obviously unclear. To shed light on their value in a broader sense, in this paper we critically evaluate 17 existing digital maturity models – identified through a systematic literature search (2011–2019) – with regard to their validity of measurement. We base our evaluation on established academic criteria, such as generalizability or theory-based interpretation, that we apply in a qualitative content analysis to these models. Our analysis shows that most of the identified models do not conform to the established evaluation criteria. Based on these insights, we derive a detailed research agenda and suggest respective research questions and strategies.

Enterprise designers need to continuously re-design their enterprise, re-evaluating the technologies that are available to digitize their operations. Although light-weight agile software development approaches are favored by software development service providers, additional requirements elicitation practices should be incorporated when scaling factors apply, since design team members need to have a shared understanding of the operating context and high-level requirements. Research indicated that the organization construction diagram (OCD) could be useful to create a shared context for enterprise operation, linking detailed functional requirements to this shared context during software development. Although the OCD is concise, its associated concepts are abstract and an additional story-card method (SCM) is needed to transform existing enterprise implementations into an OCD. Since additional evaluation of the SCM was required, this study focused on a real-world demonstration of the SCM at a Fintech company where an agile software development approach is applied. The results indicate that the SCM is useful when incorporated within an agile software development approach.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has had an interesting and often controversial history since its inception in the late 80’s by pioneers such as John Zachman. Zachman proposed the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (ZFEA), a descriptive, holistic representation of an enterprise for the purposes of providing insights and understanding. Some scholars claim that EA is an imperative to ensure successful business structures or business-IT alignment, or more recently with Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM), to manage required organizational transformation. However, EA initiatives within companies are often costly and the expected return on investment is not realized. In fact, Gartner recently indicated in their 2018 Enterprise Architecture Hype Cycle that EA is slowly emerging from the trough of disillusionment after nearly a decade. In this paper we argue that the role and value of EA is often misunderstood, and that EA, specifically the ZFEA for the purpose of this paper, could be considered as a theory given the view of theory within Information Systems (IS). The purpose of IS theories is to analyse, predict, explain and/or prescribe and it could be argued that EA often conform to these purposes. Using the taxonomy of theories as well as the structural components of theory within IS as proposed by Gregor, we motivate that the ZFEA could be regarded as an explanatory theory. Positioning ZFEA as IS explanatory theory provides insight into the role and purpose of the ZFEA (and by extension EA), and could assist researchers and practitioners with mediating the challenges experienced when instituting EA and EAM initiatives within organizations.

The Task-Technology Fit (TTF) theory provides a means of quantifying the effectiveness of technology in a system by assessing the relationship between the technology and the tasks the technology aims to support. The theory is widely recognized and has been applied in various ways, but little work has been done to summarize and synthesize the application of TTF in literature. The aim of this study is to identify and summarize the focus areas of studies that applied TTF, the environment in which it was applied, and the technologies which were considered by conducting a scoping review. It was found that applied studies focused primarily on generating theory or assessing certain real-world phenomena; was applied in a wide range of environments with the majority being in healthcare; and considered various technologies, with an increasing number of studies focusing on mobile technology. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of TTF applications and assists in framing future research to further analyze TTF studies.

Finding and comparing appropriate cloud services that best fit cloud service consumer requirements can be a complex, time-consuming and cost-intensive process, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. Since there is no “one-fits-all” cloud service provider, companies face the challenge of selecting and combining services from different vendors to meet all their requirements. Therefore, this paper calls for the design of a cloud brokering framework that would enable faster and easier selection of cloud services by recommending appropriate services through a matchmaking system. Drawing on previously conducted studies and considering current issues and practical experiences both from provider and user perspectives, we propose a framework that would identify, rank and recommend cloud services from multiple modules and components to individual consumers. Furthermore, we contribute an early-stage design of a cloud broker framework that considers cloud-service consumers’ sourcing preferences while making new cloud-sourcing decisions and that can be used in the selection and adoption phase of implementing cloud services and/or as part of a multicloud strategy.

Healthcare fraud is considered a challenge for many societies. Health care funding that could be spent on medicine, care for the elderly or emergency room visits are instead lost to fraudulent activities by materialistic practitioners or patients. With rising healthcare costs, healthcare fraud is a major contributor to these increasing healthcare costs. This study evaluates previous anomaly detection machine learning models and proposes an unsupervised framework to identify anomalies using a Generative Adversarial Network (GANs) model. The GANs anomaly detection (GAN-AD) model was applied on two different healthcare provider data sets. The anomalous healthcare providers were further analysed through the application of classification models with the logistic regression and extreme gradient boosting models showing good performance. Results from the SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) also signifies that the predictors used explain the anomalous healthcare providers.

More and more, asset management organizations are introducing data science initiatives to support predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. Asset management organizations are by nature data intensive to manage their assets like bridges, dykes, railways and roads. For this, they often implement data lakes using a variety of architectures and technologies to store big data and facilitate data science initiatives. However, the decision-outcomes of data science models are often highly reliant on the quality of the data. The data in the data lake therefore has to be of sufficient quality to develop trust by decision-makers. Not surprisingly, organizations are increasingly adopting data governance as a means to ensure that the quality of data entering the data lake is and remains of sufficient quality, and to ensure the organization remains legally compliant. The objective of the case study is to understand the role of data governance as success factor for data science. For this, a case study regarding the governance of data in a data lake in the asset management domain is analyzed to test three propositions contributing to the success of using data science. The results show that unambiguous ownership of the data, monitoring the quality of the data entering the data lake, and a controlled overview of standard and specific compliance requirements are important factors for maintaining data quality and compliance and building trust in data science products.

Big data has gained academic relevance over the last decade and is also of interest to other role-players such as governments, businesses and the general public. Based on our previous work on the Big Data Readiness Index (BDRI) we place the focus on one under-investigated aspect of big data: the linkage to happiness. The BDRI, applied on Africa, includes the topic of happiness within the digital wellbeing driver, but the link between the two topics requires further investigation. Thus, two underlying questions emerge: what is the relation between happiness and big data? And how does Africa perform in digital wellbeing? This paper includes a structured literature review highlighting five key clusters indicating this link. Furthermore, we present some first empirical insights using the BDRI focusing on Africa. Overall, the African continent performs best in the social inclusion cluster of happiness, with the most room for improvement in the job creation cluster.

Researchers have been experimenting with various drivers of the diffusion rate like sentiment analysis which only considers the presence of certain words in a tweet. We theorize that the diffusion of particular content on Twitter can be driven by a sequence of nouns, adjectives, adverbs forming a sentence. We exhibit that the proposed approach is coherent with the intrinsic disposition of tweets to a common choice of words while constructing a sentence to express an opinion or sentiment. Through this paper, we propose a Custom Weighted Word Embedding (CWWE) to study the degree of diffusion of content (retweet on Twitter). Our framework first extracts the words, create a matrix of these words using the sequences in the tweet text. To this sequence matrix we further multiply custom weights basis the presence index in a sentence wherein higher weights are given if the impactful class of tokens/words like nouns, adjectives are used at the beginning of the sentence than at last. We then try to predict the possibility of diffusion of information using Long-Short Term Memory Deep Neural Network architecture, which in turn is further optimized on the accuracy and training execution time by a Convolutional Neural Network architecture. The results of the proposed CWWE are compared to a pre-trained glove word embedding. For experimentation, we created a corpus of size 230,000 tweets posted by more than 45,000 users in 6 months. Research experimentations reveal that using the proposed framework of Custom Weighted Word Embedding (CWWE) from the tweet there is a significant improvement in the overall accuracy of Deep Learning framework model in predicting information diffusion through tweets.

The continual growth of big data necessitates efficient ways of analysing these large datasets. Data visualisation and visual analytics has been identified as a key tool in big data analysis because they draw on the human visual and cognitive capabilities to analyse data quickly, intuitively and interactively. However, current visualisation tools and visual analytical systems fall short of providing a seamless user experience and several improvements could be made to current commercially available visualisation tools. By conducting a systematic literature review, requirements of visualisation tools were identified and categorised into six groups: dimensionality reduction, data reduction, scalability and readability, interactivity, fast retrieval of results, and user assistance. The most common themes found in the literature were dimensionality reduction and interactive data exploration.

The benefits of Big Data Analytics (BDA) are substantial in instances where organisations manage to successfully implement analytical capabilities. These benefits include improved, data driven decision-making, which can lead to deeper insight into business operations and as a result better performing organisations. Not surprisingly, an increased number of organisations are researching best implementation practices for BDA projects.Similar to software projects, research has shown that many BDA projects fail or do not deliver the business value as promised. To address this issue, the main objective of this research is to identify BDA implementation considerations for new BDA endeavors that will help organisations to align their BDA efforts with their overall business strategy to maximize business value.Based on a Benefit Dependency Network (BDN) model as main theoretical underpinning, a structured literature review was conducted focusing on investment objectives, business benefits, enabling changes and IT enablers when implementing BDA. A BDA implementation requires a holistic approach by considering aspects such as the skills of people which will have an impact on the structure of the organisation, business processes and technology changes to deliver benefits and investment objectives. Each of the domains of the BDN should be considered prior to BDA implementations.The research offers a guideline to organisations implementing BDA, based on the foundation of BDN.

Big data analytics tools have many functions that are common or similar to one another. This is a problem for many organisations that are either interested or have deployed some of the tools. The problem arises because there is no mechanism on how to determine appropriateness of the tools within context in an environment. Some of the implications of the problem are that it is difficult to assess appropriateness of the tools in an environment, which sometimes result to duplication; and the value of the tools. The aim of this project was to propose a solution through a model that can be used to evaluate big data analytics tools for organisations’ benefits. The qualitative method, case study approach and semi-structured interview technique were applied in the study. From the analysis, the role of criteria, business and IT alignment, governance, and skill-sets were revealed as critical factors. Based on the factors, a model was developed, which can be used as a building block through which evaluation of big data analytics tools in an organisation is carried out.

It has been reported that WhatsApp, a social media application, had approximately 1.6 billion active users globally as of July 2019, almost one-fifth of the total world’s population. Thus, research about WhatsApp’s influence in general and especially its influence in education was relevant and significant. While there was much research involving WhatsApp and learning, it was not conclusive about the effects of WhatsApp on student learning. Specifically, research focusing on collaborative learning using WhatsApp was lacking, including research instruments for measuring collaboration on WhatsApp. Consequently, the paper’s research problem was the lack of research instruments for measuring collaboration on WhatsApp in relation to academic achievement. To address the research problem, the study followed the important initial and conceptual steps of the instrument development process to develop a research instrument to measure collaboration on WhatsApp in relation to academic achievement. The result of the paper was a developed instrument that provides researchers with a basis to measure the explanatory constructs involved in mobile collaborative learning (MCL) processes on WhatsApp and potentially other social media platforms. Therefore, the paper made an appropriately theoretical contribution, which was grounded in the scientific literature. The study facilitated positivistic research and epistemology for acquiring objective and precise scientific knowledge. Such deductive research promotes theory testing and development and presents educators and students with scientific evidence about learning with MCL applications such as WhatsApp from which both curriculum and learning design can be informed and benefited. In the age of connected mobility this is a necessity.

Faced with many challenges resulting in learners’ poor performance at the matriculation level, emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is in its infancy in South African’s high schools. However, studies have shown that mobile learning (m-learning) can be used to mitigate the challenges of STEM education. Despite, the benefits of mobile learning to rural STEM learners, its full potential has not been realized because the adoption of m-learning depends on users’ acceptance. Prior studies focused on teachers’ and learners’ acceptance of mobile learning. However, little is known about parents’ acceptance of m-learning, especially in rural areas. This study explores the acceptance of m-learning by parents of rural high school STEM learners. The study proposes the parents’ acceptance of m-learning model, which extends the technology acceptance model by introducing perceived social influence and perceived resources. Stratified random sampling was used to select 200 parents in the survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PSL-SEM) was used to analyze data from 129 valid questionnaires. The proposed model explained 41% of the variance in parents’ acceptance of mobile learning. Attitude towards the use was found to be the best predictor and the only factor that have a direct effect on behavioral intention to use mobile learning. However, all other factors have an indirect influence on behavioral intention. The findings revealed that for mobile learning to be successfully implemented in rural areas, resources need to be provided.

The usage of digital media to provide learning content is becoming increasingly popular. One form of e-learning is the Flipped Classroom (FC). FC courses, however, are still heavily dependent on the commitment of individual teachers. Repeatable descriptions of approaches or institutionalized support are rare. The high amount of work involved discourages many teachers from using FCs. Strategic course development should therefore be conducted collaboratively by several stakeholders. Change management approaches offer a solution to deal with the integration of strategies for change and consider all stakeholder groups. This paper aims to combine an FC process model and a change management approach to include all stakeholders. Based on a literature review, we develop an integrative approach and summarize the necessary aspects of change. Our results show that for the successful integration and development of FC courses, we need new roles that support the process and assure the stakeholder’s acceptance.

Extant Information Systems (IS) curriculum research has focused on the nature of undergraduate IS programmes, particularly in the US and UK, eliciting calls for studies on graduate IS programmes and in regions beyond the US and UK. This study, consequently, looks at the nature of graduate IS programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using a direct survey method, IS courses information were collected from the websites of top universities in SSA based on a 2019 webometric world ranking of universities. The course offerings from these universities are mapped to the competencies specified in the Global competency model for graduate IS programmes (MSIS 2016). The findings generally indicate, among others, non-adherence of graduate IS programmes in SSA to the MSIS 2016. The reasons for the non-adherence to the MSIS 2016 curriculum model is recommended for future research.

Despite the growing importance of digitization in all aspects of teaching and learning, digital moderation (eModeration) has received little attention in research or practice. Considering the secondary school environment, no evidence-based requirements could be found for the development of a digital moderation system. This finding provides the rationale for this investigation into the requirements for an efficient eModeration system for IT and CAT assessments at grade 12 level in South Africa (SA). This study draws on eModeration literature as well as technology adoption literature to identify a set of pre-adoption eModeration requirements against the background of the challenges and benefits of eModeration. The research design involved a single exploratory case study with IT and CAT moderators as units of analysis. Qualitative data analysis using Atlas.ti V8 was conducted on the 61 responses received from an online survey and 4 responses received from a focus group interview. The findings confirmed the absence of customized eModeration systems. The main contribution is the eModeration requirements identified from literature and then refined by triangulation with the empirical findings of the survey. The research has practical value in guiding the design of eModeration systems for the school environment.

During the years there has been an increasing number of one-to-one programs around the world. In such programs all students are equipped with portable devices, such as laptops, tablets, smartphones for learning purposes. Even if these initiatives are increasing, our knowledge of the impact of such digital transformation of education is still little studied. Based on data from a three years longitudinal study on a large-scale implementation of Chromebooks in a municipality, this paper highlights teachers’ experiences. Key findings suggest that this initiative has been successful when it comes to the administrative and technical implementation of the Chromebooks, but there is still a way to go to transform pedagogical practices to enhance student-active learning supported by the Chromebooks.

Digital course designs such as the Flipped Classroom (FC) are increasingly enriching university education. However, before implementing such an FC, teachers face the challenge of creating content in the form of materials and activities and finding a suitable development method. This is very time-consuming, which is why circumstances such as lack of time and personnel can make implementation difficult. In other areas, agile approaches have already proven to be effective in enabling flexible and efficient development. We use this opportunity to overcome different barriers in the context of FC development by creating an agile model for FC development. To achieve this, we first examined the previous research on agile development approaches concerning the implementation of an FC by a systematic literature review, concluding that no appropriate model exists yet. Building upon this, we designed an AgileFC Development Model, which can be used by teachers to create their FC. This model is very generally designed so that it can be easily adopted. On the other hand, it can be adjusted to a particular situation without effort. We also illustrate the application of the model using a small case study.